Facebook: Going The Way Of The Slide Rule

A ew years back, I laughed at Lisa for being on Facebook. I felt sure that she was too old for that kind of thing. But then it turned out that the only way I could find out what was going on with the kids when they were away at school was for me to catch up with them on FB. Let me say this about that: thank goodness when I was in college there was no publicly available photographic documentation of our activities. As we all know, college involves 4-6 years (it happens) of drinking and then doing stupid shit. The best thing about it in my day was that we had no recollection of what we had done. Suddenly Facebook illustrated all of it in vivid color, in the light of day. It’s really not a good look.

Slowly but surely, many of my friends started showing up on FB. We started scanning in photos from college so we could experience wider public humiliation just like the young whippersnappers. We marvel at how young we were, how thin, how uncomplicated life used to be, how and why my roommate’s hair was always silky and shiny like a shampoo commercial. Well, maybe only I marveled at that one, because I have hair issues.

The next time I looked up, senior citizens were on FB, posting Geritol coupons and coordinating pot luck dinners. People of all ages, it seemed, had discovered FB. Now we could bat around terms like “social media” and convince ourselves that we were hip. We should have known what was coming next.

There it was…the deafening sound of middle age on FB. And the undeniable silence of everyone under the age of 30. Yoo hoo! Hello? Anyone out there? Nope. They were gone. Where? I don’t know. Instagram, maybe. Reddit. There are dozens of places they could be and they sure as hell aren’t telling anyone. So we blew it. We could have just lurked and skulked in the background, as voyeurs and/or anthropologists (it’s a fine line between the two) and maybe continued to learn what the kids are up to, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We had to jump in. We had to make it about us, because everything is about us. Sigh.

I think now I know what happened to the dinosaurs. All the grown-ups decided they were cool. They started, I don’t know, parading the dinosaurs around displaying status “Catch me later dudes, I’m walking Dino.” It was the death knell.